Last week's cabinet votes were disappointing to say the least. They put pay-to-play politics above our children, and installed as an Attorney General someone who is more likely to be a mouthpiece than an independent check on Trump’s agenda. But they also provide a good chance to put things in perspective. We couldn’t say it better than our friends at the Indivisible Guide, former Congressional staffers, who wrote:

This is the long game. We are going to lose a lot. We are going to get good at losing...But while we are losing, something else is going to happen. We are going to keep raising our voices and slowly our representatives are going to start listening to us. We’ve seen it happen.It won’t happen because of next week’s call to action. It’ll happen over months, where you keep showing up, regularly. Then, we are going to start winning. It’ll sneak up on us. We won’t understand why we are winning. But it starts with losing in a particular way- where we raise our voices and call it out when we aren’t listened to, where we get close but not quite there.

— Indivisible Guide

Winning in the long term is going to require losing a lot in the short term. The heart is a muscle, but when we act consistently, out of love for our country and our values, it gets stronger, and becomes more immune to short-term losses, setbacks, and disappointments. Progress has never come quickly or easily. The struggle is ongoing.

But as last week’s court ruling upholding the suspension of Trump’s travel ban shows, Trump is really a paper tiger. The checks on executive power that the framers of our Constitution wisely installed over two centuries ago mean that Donald Trump can’t do much without the backing of all-of-us, as represented by Congress. And that’s why not only do we need to get used to losing in Congress, we also need to keep calling Congress and demanding that its members do their jobs. Now more than ever. If we don’t hold them accountable, that’s on all-of-us.

All-of-us must call our three members of Congress and tell them that we support the Constitution and therefore demand that Congress immediately: